Fri Mar 11/05
Troubles ahead, troubles behind

The story of Robert McCartney's murder by an IRA volunteer is absolutely fascinating — I can't believe today was the first I'd heard about it. (Tomorrow's Guardian offers an exhaustive and riveting account.) Basically, McCartney and a friend went for a couple of pints at a "new-wave Irish gastropub" (i.e., there's cilantro in the stew), where a certain yob took umbrage at the way McCartney looked at a female member of his party. Said yob rallied the troops, who proceeded thusly:

…outside the bar, McCartney was stabbed and beaten so badly he lost an eye… Others in the Short Strand [neighbourhood of Belfast] say he was battered with sewer rods before his head was stamped on. His family say the men went back into the pub, locked the doors, cleaned up, removed CCTV footage and did not call an ambulance. Picked up by a police patrol, McCartney died in hospital that night. His friend, whose throat was slight from ear to ear and stomach from navel to chest, survived.

Now, I presume this is not the only time in the last 36 years that a Belfastian has done something rotten to someone of his own religion. Every pub in Northern Ireland is either Catholic or Protestant and, at the risk of indulging a stereotype, bar brawls cannot be an uncommon occurrence in any city on the Emerald Isle. Thus, to an outsider's eyes, this seems an open and shut case: catch the bastards (no easy task, admittedly), try them for murder and send them away to prison, never to be heard from again.

But no — the shit has well and truly hit the fan here. The campaign for justice being mounted by McCartney's fiancé and sisters seems to be taking on almost Omagh-esque gravitas — where the (Real) IRA's crowning monstrosity solidified support for the peace process across sectarian lines, so Robert McCartney's murder threatens to turn the tide within the Catholic community against Gerry Adams' shady association-but-not-association with what remains of the IRA. Already the House of Commons has downgraded Sinn Fein's status.

Just what justice entails in this case is something of a puzzle, as no one is suggesting that McCartney's murder had anything overtly to do with the IRA. The Guardian story does claim that McCartney knew very well who he was up against, as both he and his attacker were from the same tight-knit neighbourhood. Still, the reason the incident has taken on such significance seems to be because of the impossibly quaint notion, as put forth by Paula McCartney, that the IRA men "seem to be out of control"… in 2005, mind you! ("This isn't about what the IRA has done for the community in the past," went the decidedly non-ingratiating preface to her comments.)

You have to love Adams, too, who has until now successfully marketed himself abroad as Not At All Like Yasser Arafat: "These were a group of people who were out drinking, who sparked off each other," he said. "It wasn't an IRA attack. It wasn't a republican plan, it wasn't an operation." Dude, how do you know all this? Oh, here we go:

I know some of the people [involved], but I have to say they deserve due process. In my statement when I suspended the people [from Sinn Fein] I made the case that it was without prejudice, and that some of them may well be innocent of any offence. So I do know some of them, but I can't make judgements.

Yuck. And then, as if it wasn't bad enough, on Tuesday the IRA offered to kill the people who killed McCartney.

I don't pretend to be an expert on this; I'm only conveying an outsider's bewildered, fascinated impressions of it, and of how much damage it's doing to all involved — to Gerry Adams, to Sinn Fein, and to the people of Short Strand who seem more perplexed at one Catholic IRA victim than at hundreds of Protestant ones. But hey, whatever works, I guess. If 30 years of murder for nothing wasn't enough to break the Troubles' back, perhaps a bar fight is a fittingly absurd waypoint on the road to peace.